Beyond household characteristics: what influence adoption of banking innovations in Northern Ghana?

The quest for maintenance of market share and survival had left no option for banks than to provide quality customer services. This has led to the introduction of information technology (IT) innovations to offer quality services. This study examined the factors influencing intensity of adoption of such innovations in northern Ghana. Using a multi-stage sampling procedure, we obtained data from 476 customers for the study. The Poisson and Negative Binomial models were employed for the analysis. However, the Poisson model fits better to the data than the Negative Binomial model and the results revealed personal/household and attitudinal attributes as the significant determinants of the intensity of adoption in northern Ghana. Specifically, number of visits made by a customer to a bank, relative advantage, trialability and compatibility constitute these attributes. This thus, highlights the importance of introducing innovations that are not only user-friendly, but beneficial in terms of cost.